Abstract

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1856 verse-novel Aurora Leigh was her intended magnum opus. Yet she has been taken to task by critics, both in her age and ours, for her seemingly strange hybrid use of the verse-novel form. In order to reconcile the disparity we must see this unusual text as something different from a fragmentary or not-very-successful instantiation of either genre separately but instead as a “literary self-portrait”—a form of polemical life narrative. I argue in this essay that Barrett Browning inherited this form from her revolutionary foremother Mary Wollstonecraft and passed it on to her modernist literary “daughter” Virginia Woolf in heretofore unexamined ways.

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